Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [50]
She was too embarrassed to consider the tantalizing possibilities that lay before them if she were to let her mind go free. Really, what she most wanted to do was to reassure him. She didn’t pose a threat. She didn’t. She wanted to prove it to him.
She turned so she was lying on her back looking up. He did the same.
She cleared her throat. “Tell me about Kaya,” Bridget said. “What’s she like?”
Eric didn’t answer right away.
“I bet she’s beautiful.”
He let out a long breath. “Yeah. She is.” He sounded a little guarded. He was private about these kinds of things.
“Light hair or dark?”
“Dark. She’s actually half Mexican, too.”
“That’s cool.” Bridget, absurdly, wished she could find some way of being half Mexican. “Does she go to Columbia?”
“She just graduated.”
To Bridget, it sounded so old and sophisticated and totally winning to be half Mexican and have just graduated from Columbia. She felt herself developing an inferiority complex as she lay there stupidly in her sleeping bag, shrinking into her underage, non-Mexican skin. She didn’t even want to say anything else, for fear of measuring up even stupider and more juvenile next to his dazzling girlfriend.
Why had Bridget invited Eric’s girlfriend into their little orange tent?
He turned on his side, facing her, and propped his head on his hand. Talking a little, even about this, had made things easier between them. “Hey. I want to hear about your friends.”
This was bait she could not resist. And so she spent her nervousness on chirping and blabbing and yammering away, just as stupid and juvenile as could be.
Lena’s next hurdle was a big one. It was Valia. Lena had been avoiding her grandmother so scrupulously for so many months, it was almost terrifying to look right at her.
Lena half hoped Valia would refuse to pose, but she didn’t. She sat behind the desk in the den and looked at Lena straight on.
“You can work at the computer, if you want. I could draw you that way,” Lena offered.
Valia shrugged. “I am done vith the computer today.”
Lena calculated it was already late in Greece; that was probably the reason.
“You could watch TV, if that would be more comfortable.”
“No. I vill just sit here,” Valia said.
Lena had to stiffen her spine. She was looking for a way out, and Valia was looking right at her. Lena made herself be brave.
It was rough at first. Lena had been avoiding Valia’s obvious pain, and her own associated troubles. Seeing Valia’s face, she couldn’t ignore that pain. Drawing Valia meant not only seeing it but going in after it. Lena felt that her only hope was to try in stages.
How much her grandma had aged in the past year. Valia’s skin was so wrinkled it looked like it might fall off her bones. Her once-dark eyes were watery and faded, with a bluish tinge around the irises. They looked out from the folds of skin as if from inside two grottos.
Bapi had loved Valia. Lena imagined that even when they were old, Bapi had seen Valia as the young, beautiful woman she had been. Now there was no one to see her that way, and as a consequence, she had shriveled up.
Lena suddenly grasped her challenge. She was going to try to see that Valia—Bapi’s Valia—in this face, if she could. She wouldn’t just find the sorrow, plentiful though it was. She would be like an archaeologist. She would unearth the former Valia; she would rediscover her in the midst of all the ravages.
Now Lena was really looking, and Valia stood up to it. She looked right back. Lena had never done a drawing with her subject gazing directly into her eyes. It was like a staring contest fought to a stalemate.
Lena the archaeologist saw clues in the shape of Valia’s eyebrows. She borrowed a little from Effie, who some people thought resembled Valia. She saw her father in Valia’s mouth and chin. Lena was drawing what she saw, but she was allowing the past to inform the way she interpreted it, if that was possible. She could see the beauty if she really tried.
Valia’s usual aggressive frown was slowly sifting out of her features. The parts and places that